Professor Beth Lyon joined the Villanova Law School in the Fall of 2001, where she is the Founding Director of the Farmworker Legal Aid Clinic and Associate Professor of Law. Professor Lyon received her B.A. from University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, her M.S. from Georgetown University School of Foreign Service, and her J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center. At Georgetown Law School, she was the managing editor of Law and Policy in International Business (since renamed Georgetown Journal of International Law) and a Ford Foundation Fellow, working in Lima, Peru for the Comisión Andina de Juristas. Prior to joining the Villanova faculty, Professor Lyon was a staff attorney for the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights (now Human Rights First), a consultant at the D.C. Coalition Against Domestic Violence and the Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions, and the recipient of a three year teaching fellowship at the International Human Rights Clinic at Washington College of Law, American University.

Professor Lyon is a member of the Society of American Law Teachers Board of Directors and a Co-Chair of the Board of Directors of Latina & Latino Critical Theory, Inc. She also serves on the Board of Directors of Friends of Farmworkers, a non-profit legal services agency that serves immigrant workers in Pennsylvania, and she is President of the Board of Directors for the Global Workers Justice Alliance, a non-profit agency that trains and assists advocates whose clients have returned to Mexico and Guatemala.

Professor Lyon is a national authority on the laws and policies affecting immigrant workers. She has written extensively on domestic and international immigrant and farm worker rights, and generally about the human rights of the poor. Her publications are widely cited in academic and practitioner publications, and she has been quoted in various news media outlets. Most recently, Professor Lyon’s suggested terminology for unauthorized immigrant workers was cited and adopted in 2006 articles in The Tax Lawyer and the Harvard Latino Law Review. Last fall, the Chicago Lawyer quoted her article on the rights of Illinois farm workers. Professor Lyon is also a frequent speaker and panelist for academic and bar association conferences, speaking both about policy questions and also about practical issues of lawyering through interpreters and providing legal services to rural minorities.